01:00 AM EST on Monday, January 30, 2006

Die-hard fans of politics know that Sen. Elizabeth Dole, of North Carolina, has stage presence. They recall her unflappable speaking turn at the Republican National Convention that nominated her husband, Bob Dole, for president 10 years ago in San Diego. Then there was her run for president six years ago -- well out of the money but reasonably well-received -- followed by her winning campaign for the Senate four years ago.

Last week, at the first news conference of her year in the crucible of the Republican Senate campaign organization, Dole showed she still has the knack and, at age 69, plenty of ambition. She didn't just enter the conference room at the GOP headquarters named for Ronald Reagan. She made an entrance, in camera-friendly crimson, and never mind that this was a pencil-and-pad affair. Dole put the dab of color on a drab canvas of several dozen members of the political media, moving around the room with smiles and handshakes and folksy how-do-you-do's.

The flair was extra. Dole also showed off the grasp of statistics and story lines that has come to be expected of the modern partisan campaign chief, talking up the candidates for the open seats in Maryland and Washington state, for example, and offering a barbed comment on the Republican who is the vulnerable Lincoln Chafee's primary challenger in Rhode Island.

But the chairwoman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee will need more than stage presence and one-liners to see Chafee and the rest of her partisans through the storms of campaign 2006 and continue the GOP's majority control of the Senate.

The political climate for Republicans has chilled since President Bush began his second term last year with the wind at his back. As campaign chief for the GOP, Dole still enjoys a numerical advantage on paper. The GOP holds 55 of 100 Senate seats and is defending fewer incumbents than the Democrats are this year.

But today there are the makings of Democratic momentum: the unpopularity of the war in Iraq, the government's performance in the wake of Hurricane Katrina and the scandal surrounding disgraced Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff -- all combined with the historical tendency for a president to lose House and Senate seats in his sixth year in office. Dole's organization has also disappointed some partisans in the fundraising and candidate-recruitment departments.

Few commentators will be shocked, therefore, if the Democrats make the net gain of six Senate seats that they need to seize control of the Senate.

This far from Election Day, the numbers game may be a little abstract for some tastes, but the potential power shift behind them is as compelling. Majority rule for Democrats would mean power to set the Senate's agenda, to lock in President Bush's lame-duck status, to light up the airwaves with high-wattage hearings on any Abramoffs or Abu Ghraibs that may mark the administration's final two years.

Dole need only look to the chairmanships of the key legislative panels for incentive to fight for every Republican seat in the Senate.

Today the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee is Virginia Republican John W. Warner, the World War II veteran who has often deferred to President Bush and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld on the conduct of the war in Iraq.

Under Democratic leadership, the panel would get a new boss, Sen. Carl Levin, an aggressive partisan from Michigan who often looks to Rhode Island Sen. Jack Reed for guidance on military matters.

If Justice John Paul Stevens or one of the other anchors of the Supreme Court's liberal wing were to retire, abortion-rights advocates would no longer watch in frustration as Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter ushered another conservative Bush nominee to a party-line Senate vote for confirmation.

Instead, if Dole's troops falter in the fall elections, it will be an abortion-rights Democrat, Vermont Sen. Patrick J. Leahy, who holds the Judiciary Committee gavel and with it the potential to block a Bush nominee who would push the court to the right.

The high court, of course, is high on this week's political agenda and Chafee provides much of what little suspense remains around Samuel A. Alito Jr.'s nomination. This morning, Chafee plans to say whether he will vote for or against seating the conservative federal appeals court judge on the Supreme Court.

As with every difficult vote he will face this election year, either choice carries liabilities for Chafee. If he supports Alito, Democrats are poised to say he has broken a promise to protect abortion rights. If he opposes Alito, Republican challenger Steve Laffey will charge that Chafee is in thrall to abortion-rights absolutists who oppose common-sense restrictions on the procedure.

During her news conference last week, Dole moved easily from celebrating the Republican Party line, and the senators who hew to it, to the defense of a maverick such as Chafee, who has opposed Mr. Bush more than anyone else in her caucus -- on the war in Iraq, on his tax-cutting policy, on the costly new drug benefit for Medicare recipients.

All the Democrats have to offer on Iraq is "cut and run," Dole said. Despite the "negativism" of the Democrats, she said, "the economy keeps rolling" under Mr. Bush. Only on the Medicare drug program did Dole falter, characterizing its troubled launch as "a few hiccups" -- a phrase she quickly took back when a reporter challenged it.

Dole heaped praise on the only Senate Republican who seems to be in more jeopardy than Chafee, the outspoken Pennsylvania conservative Rick Santorum. "He's a great orator," Dole declared, and one who's "willing to take on the tough issues." Of Democratic challenger Bob Casey, also fairly conservative on social issues, Dole asserted, "I don't know really what Bob Casey stands for."

Almost a full year before Rhode Island's September primary elections, Dole's office bankrolled a round of attack ads ridiculing Chafee's Republican opponent, Cranston Mayor Laffey.

What is Dole going to do, she was asked last week, if the winner of the Republican contest is Laffey, who agrees with her and President Bush on such issues as the war in Iraq and his judicial nominations?

One of her first duties as chief of the campaign committee, Dole replied, is to protect her incumbents. "Lincoln Chafee is a valued member of our conference," she said. "He's an independent voice and we understand that," she said.

Then Dole gave what appears to be the key to Republican thinking about securing the party's beachhead in Democratic Rhode Island: "Lincoln Chafee is the person who will hold that seat."

Then Dole said, "I will not even entertain the idea that Steve Laffey will win that primary."

John E. Mulligan is Washington Bureau chief of the Providence Journal.

jmulligan@belo-dc.com / (202) 661-8423